4 research outputs found
Transforming Home Appliances into IoT Devices
Home appliances were, until not very recently, isolated devices uncapable of communicate with others. With the recent technological advances is it possible nowadays to connect all these devices to the internet enabling them with the capacity to communicate between them and also the possibility to store and analyse the data generated making them more efficient.
Due to these advancements, terms like Internet of Things and Cloud Computing surfaced. These terms represent architectures that allow communications and interactions between devices. The potential of these technologies is substantial for the improvement of productivity and eco-nomic impact.
These advancements allowed home appliances to generate an enormous amount of data, and as repercussion, the need for structures able to receive, storage and process the data emerged.
The present document contains a proposition of an architecture that allows to collect and send home appliances’ data to the Cloud, a way to store and make them available to other applications and a platform that allows the data’s visualisation and analysis. The proposed architecture was tested with a refrigerator offered by Electrolux inserted in the ProSEcO project
Using Remote Sensing to Quantify the Joint Effects of Climate and Land Use/Land Cover Changes on the Caatinga Biome of Northeast Brazilian
Caatinga biome, located in the Brazilian semi-arid region, is the most populous semi-arid
region in the world, causing intensification in land degradation and loss of biodiversity over time.
The main objective of this paper is to determine and analyze the changes in land cover and use, over
time, on the biophysical parameters in the Caatinga biome in the semi-arid region of Brazil using
remote sensing. Landsat-8 images were used, along with the Surface Energy Balance Algorithm
for Land (SEBAL) in the Google Earth Engine platform, from 2013 to 2019, through spatiotemporal
modeling of vegetation indices, i.e., leaf area index (LAI) and vegetation cover (VC). Moreover, land
surface temperature (LST) and actual evapotranspiration (ETa) in Petrolina, the semi-arid region of
Brazil, was used. The principal component analysis was used to select descriptive variables and
multiple regression analysis to predict ETa. The results indicated significant effects of land use and
land cover changes on energy balances over time. In 2013, 70.2% of the study area was composed of
Caatinga, while the lowest percentages were identified in 2015 (67.8%) and 2017 (68.7%). Rainfall
records in 2013 ranged from 270 to 480 mm, with values higher than 410 mm in 46.5% of the study
area, concentrated in the northern part of the municipality. On the other hand, in 2017 the lowest
annual rainfall values (from 200 to 340 mm) occurred. Low vegetation cover rate was observed by
LAI and VC values, with a range of 0 to 25% vegetation cover in 52.3% of the area, which exposes the
effects of the dry season on vegetation. The highest LST was mainly found in urban areas and/or
exposed soil. In 2013, 40.5% of the region’s area had LST between 48.0 and 52.0 C, raising ETa
rates (~4.7 mm day1). Our model has shown good outcomes in terms of accuracy and concordance
(coefficient of determination = 0.98, root mean square error = 0.498, and Lin’s concordance correlation coefficient = 0.907). The significant increase in agricultural areas has resulted in the progressive
reduction of the Caatinga biome. Therefore, mitigation and sustainable planning is vital to decrease
the impacts of anthropic actions
A Natureza e a gênese das Minas do Sul nos livros de André João Antonil e Sebastião da Rocha Pita
Characterisation of microbial attack on archaeological bone
As part of an EU funded project to investigate the factors influencing bone preservation in the archaeological record, more than 250 bones from 41 archaeological sites in five countries spanning four climatic regions were studied for diagenetic alteration. Sites were selected to cover a range of environmental conditions and archaeological contexts. Microscopic and physical (mercury intrusion porosimetry) analyses of these bones revealed that the majority (68%) had suffered microbial attack. Furthermore, significant differences were found between animal and human bone in both the state of preservation and the type of microbial attack present. These differences in preservation might result from differences in early taphonomy of the bones. © 2003 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved